Condensed Matter Seminar: Optics at the Extreme

Wed, 09/24/2014 - 16:00 - 18:00

Professor Nader Enghetta, University of Pennsylvania

Recent development in condensed
matter physics and nanoscience has made it possible to tailor materials with
unusual parameters and characteristics. In
my group, we have been exploring light-matter interaction in metamaterials and
metastructures with extreme parameters, such near-zero permittivity and
near-zero permeability, and with extreme features such as very high phase
velocity, very low energy velocity, extremely thin (one-atom-thick metasurfaces),
subwavelength nonreciprocal vortexes, extreme anisotropy, giant nonlinearity in
phase-change dynamics, “static optics”, nanoscale computation in optical
nanocircuits, and more. Such “extreme
optics” will provide us with unprecedented features and functionalities in both
wave physics and quantum optics and engineering. I will discuss some of our ongoing work in
these areas.